The Politics of Jesus

There is on old “Frank and Earnest” comic strip where Frank is sitting on an airplane with a worried look on his face, and he asks the flight attendant, “Are there any air bags on this plane?” To which she replies, “Well, there are a couple of congressmen up in first class.”

In a couple of days we will finally have a little relief from listening to the air bags.

The reality is, however, that there’s no part of life that is not concerned with politics. I’m not talking about this partisan orgy of mud-slinging and rhetorical hype that we call a presidential election. Nor am I speaking of politics as the arena of public life which is concerned with government. That’s politics in the narrow sense. I’m talking about something much more basic.

Politics is about people and the relationships between people or groups of people.

Some folks say that the word politics derives from two words: ‘Poly,’ meaning ‘many,’ and ‘ticks,’ meaning ‘blood-sucking parasites.’

But actually, the word politics comes from the Greek word ‘politikos,’ which derives from ‘polites,’ which means ‘citizen,’ and ‘polis,’ which means ‘city.’ So politics has to do with the way in which we live as citizens in society and order our lives for the common good of the ‘politeuma.’ Life itself is political, and there is virtually no decision I can make, nothing I can say, no action that I take that does not have political consequences, for I do not live in isolation from other people. When I sneeze, my neighbor catches cold.

So the question becomes not ‘Will I be political?’ but ‘What kind of politics will I practice?’ How will my words or my actions or my decisions affect the lives of other people around me? What message will I be sending?

All Saints’ Sunday is a good time to think about politics in this broader sense. For on All Saints’, we take time to remember that Christians are not isolated individuals who live in this world alone, passing through it untouched by anyone or anything and not having any impact or effect on anyone. We are a people, a politeuma, a commonwealth. We’re connected.

On All Saints’, we also pause to remember those of our politeuma, those fellow-citizens of the household of God, who are no longer present among us in body, but whose memory we hold dear and who have now joined that larger city, that larger politeuma toward which we are all travelling, the New Jerusalem, the City of God.

It would be impossible to listen to the words of Jesus as recorded in today’s Gospel and not realize their political impact. The stately and dignified language of our English translations which make for suitable reading in public worship can sometimes camouflage the raw impact of the words themselves. “Blessed are you who are poor,” sounds somehow pious and dignified. But we lose the ironic force, and even the gallows humor, present in the words themselves.

“Congratulations you poor, for yours is the domain of God” would get us much closer to the real spirit of Jesus’ words. “Congratulations you who are hungry now, for your turn is coming to be filled. Congratulations you who weep now, for your time of laughter and joy is coming. But woe to you who are rich; you’ve already gotten all you’re ever going to get. Woe to you who are full now, for your own day of hunger is coming. Woe to you who are laughing now, for sorrow and pain are just around the corner.”

Who can deny the shocking impact of those words? Who could deny their political implications? Imagine yourself in the audience who heard Jesus say those things. How would you hear them? If you were one of the poor or hungry or mourning, perhaps you would be cynical of the promises in Jesus’ words. “Yeah, sure, yet another politician telling me how lucky I am to be poor.”

But if you were a comfortable, well-fed, hard-working middle-class person with a good job, a house with your mortgage nearly paid off, and good health, those words would have a very different impact, wouldn’t they? They might be rather unsettling, causing you to feel some guilt or some sense of unease. They might plant a small seed of doubt in your mind, that maybe your comfortable life is really a house of cards that could come tumbling down without warning.

Or they might be highly offensive. “Why doesn’t somebody shut this guy up?” might be your reaction. Well, in Jesus’ case, somebody did. Jesus was not crucified because he poked some mild fun at the religious establishment or because he did some good things for people like curing their illnesses. People don’t crucify stand-up comics or faith-healers or even mild social critics. People who get crucified are people who are perceived as threats, as dangerous subversives. The Romans crucified Jesus because they feared him as a political agitator. They recognized that the politics of his words and deeds had the potential for overturning their world.

What would happen if there existed a significant group of people within any society, who suddenly began to preach that we should love our enemies and do good to them and pray for them, and actually began to do that? It sounds good, doesn’t it?

Well, I suppose it depends on where you sit whether it sounds good or not. If you’re the CEO of a major defense contractor, I doubt if you’d welcome much talk about loving our enemies. That’s a very political issue, isn’t it? And what would happen to our entire banking industry and the stock market, if suddenly there were a significant group of people who preached and practiced lending to others without charging interest, and even without forcing them to repay the loan? Would that turn the world upside down or what? No surprise that they crucified Jesus.

John Howard Yoder, a Mennonite theologian, wrote a book back in the early ’80s called The Politics of Jesus in which he explored some of these very issues. Those of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus cannot get away from the fact that following Jesus means practicing a particular kind of politics – the politics of love, of non-violence, of non-retaliation, of generosity, of mercy.

That’s a pretty tough program, isn’t it? These words of Jesus are very hard for us to hear. Even harder for us to put into practice. I mean, we’re just trying to provide for our families, get our kids educated, live a decent life, and do as much good along the way as we can, but we’re not saints.

Ah, but we are! That’s precisely how Paul and other writers in the New Testament refer to the Christian community – as “the saints.” The word saint means “holy one,” and the word holy doesn’t mean especially pious or religious or heroic. The word holy means “set apart.” It means “called out from.” It means “distinctive.” We are God’s distinctive people. We are God’s called out ones. Or as the older English versions translated it, “God’s peculiar people.” We are called to be a people set apart by our practice of the politics of love.

Perhaps that’s why on All Saints’ Sunday, we don’t primarily remember the great heroes and heroines of the faith, but we remember the ordinary Christians who have been part of our own company of saints. We remember how they struggled to live faithfully; we remember their gifts which they offered to the service of Christ and to the rest of God’s people. We remember their humility, their love, their service. And in remembering them, we find courage and faith to try, however difficult it may be, to be faithful ourselves in practicing the politics of Jesus.

We’re not under any illusions that we always get it right. Nor do we think it’s easy to practice the politics of love. In fact, we know that it is sometimes the hardest thing of all – to love another person or to love a whole group of persons for Christ’s sake. Nothing is harder in this world than loving others, particularly those who are enemies or strangers or aliens. But it is what saints do, or try to do, and that’s why we need to do it together, why we must do it together. We can never do it alone.

To live the life of a saint is to live in God’s mercy. To live the life of a saint is to live in the often-uncomfortable paradox of being the sinners we know ourselves to be, and at the same time, being the holy persons God says we are. Maybe you don’t feel especially holy, but you are. God is calling us to be holy. God is calling us to be his. God is calling us forward. It isn’t easy. It doesn’t come naturally. But God is with us and will always be with us, just as God is with all the saints.

And so we gather here to remember who we are – God’s politeuma, God’s commonwealth. We gather to recommit ourselves to practice the politics of heaven in the midst of this world. We gather to eat and drink the body and blood of Christ to gain strength for the rigors that following that call will bring upon us. And we remember those faithful ones who have gone ahead of us to that domain of God where faith is swallowed up in sight, where what we see only in hope and by visions, they see face to face.